Dark Shadow

The Dark Shadow is a real ghost story about a young girl who sees a black mass with red eyes when she has a sleepover with her friend.

When I was 12 years old my parents divorced and I went to live with my mother. We moved into an old Victorian house which my mother rented temporarily until we found something better.

For the first couple of days after we moved in, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but at night I had trouble sleeping. When I did manage to fall asleep, I would have terrifying and disturbing nightmares. I would always wake up in a cold sweat, but I could never remember what the dreams were about.

I started feeling a little paranoid. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of dark shadows moving out of the corner of my eye. I just shrugged it off as being due to my overactive imagination.

One day, when my mother and I were cleaning out the attic, I came across something very strange. Tucked away in a corner, I discovered a ouija board, some candles and a small black book with weird gothic lettering inside.

When I showed them to my mom, her face went pale. She immediately gathered them all up, took them outside and threw them in the trash. I tried to asked her what they were, but she refused to speak about it.

The next day, she went shopping and when she came back, she had a present for me. It was a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a gold cross. She had also bought a matching necklace for herself. At that time, I wasn’t very religious, but I wore it just to please her.

I had a friend named Maddie and we decided to have a sleepover at my house. My mother was going to visit relatives, so we would be on our own for the night. I wasn’t worried because Maddie was rarely afraid of anything, so she always made me feel safe.

We watched some movies and shortly before midnight, we decided to go to bed. The two of us lay in bed chatting for a while and eventually we fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, I was awoken by a strange sound. It was a low growling noise. I woke up Maddie and she said she could hear it too. Gradually, it grew louder until it sounded like an intense humming of evil.

Wondering what it was, we slid out of bed, opened the bedroom door and peered out. What we saw

A dark shadow was slowly moving up the stairs. Everything about it was just pure black. It almost blended in with the other shadows, but it was much darker. My first instinct was to run, but I couldn’t move. Fear had me rooted to the spot.

When it reached the top of the stairs, the dark mass just stood there with its head bowed and shoulders slumped. Its whole silhouette seemed fuzzy and indistinct around the edges.

It had no face to look at, just a heavy black outline of something that looked vaguely human. Slowly, it turned to face us and all I saw were deep red eyes staring at me. It was as if it was looking straight through us. It had something that looked like a mouth and seemed to smile at us with a malicious grin.

I looked at Maddie and she looked at me. I will never forget the look of terror on her face. I felt my body tighten up in fear but I couldn’t remove my hand from the doorknob.

The dark shadow just kept leering at us as it slowly approached. I saw it reach out with one of its hands and I screamed, but I couldn’t really move. As it came closer, I felt like I was being choked, and then I remember my eyes closing like I was fainting. I reached up and pulled my collar aside, exposing the gold cross around my neck.

The shadow seemed to stop in its tracks. Maddie suddenly grabbed me and pulled me back as she slammed the door. We piled up furniture against the door and waited. All we could hear was an eerie silence.

I was shaking so hard that Maddie actually had to hold me to get me to calm down. We were so freaked out that we just sat there behind the pile of furniture and held onto my gold cross for dear life. We stayed awake all night, too terrified to close our eyes.

As the morning light began shining through the window, my nerves were so shot and I was so exhausted that I eventually passed out. I awoke a few hours later when my mother came home. We opened the door and looked out into the hallway. There was nothing there, but we could see what seemed like vague dusty footprints where the dark mass had been.

I told my mother all about what happened. The next day, we moved out and stayed in a motel until we could find another house. I’m 18 now and I still think about this incident all the time…

I know that was a demon we saw that night… It was too dark and felt too evil to be anything else…